Digital ID

Note: This page is work-in-progress. May be entirely missing citations and major content sections.

Digital ID refers broadly to one's unique digital identifiers and online software systems that recognize them. Recent developments target biometrics (authentication) and reducing the need for card-based IDs.

Background

Trust Problem

2 strangers do not automatically trust each other.

Imagine a stranger asking to borrow 1000$ and him expecting one to trust him to return it? Although this example is about money, sometimes a trust issue is about identity.

Identity

Knock-knock expression might not have become a joke if it wasnt so easy to deceive with words.

Trust of identity is brokered through a previously-trusted 3rd party, in one form or another. Young children often are introduced to each other by a chain of trust of 3rd party entities --typically a parent or trusted friend.

Identification

To drive a car, a driver's licence (A physical object provided by a trusted 3rd party bearing that vouches for the person present) is required to be present on the person.

E-Commerce

2000-2019, E-commerce evolved to need trust established at multiple levels of protocol, from TLS certificates to Multi-factor authentication (more needed on MFA etc).
(more needed on history, developments, who are the primary sources and more.)

Centralization, Access Control

In the IT world, a computer workgroup has a problem: a known user Bob is trusted by (account on) only the few computers he used to-date. For each additional computer Bob wishes to use, he must register a new user account with a new password to memorize. This is one of the many scalability problems in IT is being able to add new computers without having to manually set up the account for that user. Directory Services software and protocols deliver a centralized set-and-forget approach to storing a users account in a central database, against which devices added to the network can directly trust/authenticate.

The government and business world claim to see problems that parallel the workgroup model. For example it could appear to save a lot of administrative overhead if a new hospital was built nearby and could access individual files of the whole country, automatically. Another value claimed is that the entrance could be automated using facial-recognition (a biometric ID) and perhaps reduce wait-times and increase throughput.

Composite Primary key

In the realm of Relational databases, an entity (ie an online shopper) is and must be uniquely identified by its 'primary key'. When 2 or more attributes are required to uniquely identify an entity, this collection of attributes is called a composite primary key.

Virtualization

To financially survive regional lockdown policies, many businesses made services accessible over the internet as much as possible.

Training institutions delivered streamed lecture content and web-based assessments. Fast food and retail establishments promoted mobile-apps and online services with slogans like 'skip the line' or 'order online, pickup in person', or 'curbside delivery' all of which use some sort of phone-accessible ordering system.

Biometrics

Biometric identification, broadly, includes fingerprints and manual descriptions eye colour, hair colour, height, weight and other crude descriptions which served as crude identifiers in centuries past.

Modern biometrics have advanced to include retinal scans, facial-recognition, fingerprint-scanners, voice ID and more.

Automation

Automation brings together many of the above topics. Biometric data can be registered/collected/updated/verified without manual interventions. Server-side software can send a notification to a users phone if new information is required.